Part 3- Love Letters, Leave Letters and All That

Part 3- Love Letters, Leave Letters and All That 

 (In my last post, before the interval, I had left the story hanging of what my friend Anitha said to me when i suggested we elope, the story is continued here)

Once on a hot summer evening after college hours, I went over to the sports field behind the college buildings and climbed up the tiered steps surrounding the ground to chat with the gang, the whole gang of friends being there, before we all went home. As we talked of this and that, the talk gradually turned around to who i liked best among our group of friends. Always truthful (a disease I used to suffer much from in those days) I replied with the name of my friend Anitha, who had impressed me with her honesty and for brutally speaking the truth to me. For the others were always wary of getting on the wrong side of my tongue, while Anitha was the one who kept me grounded whenever i got too big for my boots with a swollen head. Yes, painful as it is to recall now, i was a conceited little moron in my younger days. But it’s all part of growing up, for when you are young you often think you have everything, till life teaches you the hard lessons.

Let’s get back to the lesson I learnt. While I was waxing eloquent over what a best pal Anitha was to me, my friends suggested the obvious, if she was such a great friend, why hadn’t I taken the next step and proposed to her? The thought had never entered my mind till it was suddenly planted there by that question. Never one to let grass grow under my feet once a decision had been made; I hurried down the steps to the lowest level where Anitha was resting after her exertions on the track. Did I mention earlier that she was a star sportswoman, a fine track and field athlete, an all-rounder in the short and long sprint events? Anyhow as she sat there, toweling her sweat off, i walked up to her, in front of the whole cheering gang who had come to watch me propose and said casually to her "odi polama?" (Shall we elope?), a dialogue borrowed off some film i had seen recently.

Not a bit flustered, she coolly appraised the situation and said calmly "on one condition, you race with me up to the college gates from here and if you win the race, i shall". So started the most horrifying running race of my life, where I was racing against a girl who knew how to put me in place in her own style. Although I tried my best, face it, i am no athlete in top condition and she easily outran me to the cheers of everyone present on the ground. That was the end of any romantic feeling I had towards her, for public humiliation often wakes you up from any fantasies .The lesson i learnt from that episode is never to try too hard when it comes to proposing to girls. Either they take you as it is or they don’t, but never go and do anything unnatural just to impress them. It can never be sustained in the long run.

Well, enough of love letters and proposals, lets come to leave letters now. I am sure many of us would have written hundreds of leave letter in our life starting from our school days right up to now - to our teachers and superiors at the office. But i am guessing that i am the only person who ever wrote a leave letter to a girl in love. It happened like this. We had got together in November and for the next three months had spent a lot of time hanging out together, so much so that i had majorly neglected to study for my exams and had fallen way behind the others in class. It didn’t matter to her because she was in the pre-final year (my junior batch) and they had just light subjects to pass. But I on the other hand was on the eve of my final year exams, when all the monster subjects (the toughest papers) were on the exam menu. Something had to be done, if I had to avoid becoming a total wreck in the exams.

So, I met her on the first day of February with a leave letter which went something like this “

From,

          -------------

To,

        --------------

Respected madam,

   As my upcoming final year exams are scheduled for the first week of April and I have barely sixty days left to cover the whole years portions, which I neglected to prepare till now as I was far too busy hanging out in your honored company, I request you to kindly grant me leave from our relationship till the second half of April when I will be able to devote my full attention to you like old times. I hope you understand that circumstances have forced this necessary change on me and this is nothing personal against you. Expecting your kind assent to my study leave,

                         Thanking you,

                                                                                                             Yours lovingly,

                                                                                                               ---------------"

And when I handed over this letter, the stupid girl decided to reject my leave letter and broke up with me permanently, after abusing me with choice words. Well, the aftermath of the story was, I felt insulted and angry and as anger is a rare emotion with me and too valuable to be wasted (mine is a smoldering cold anger rather than a hot outbursts type), I used the anger to set the alarm clock and wake up earlier than anyone else and to study later in the night when everyone else would have dropped off, just by imagining that the girl who had abused me would still be studying and I had to beat her with better marks and any sacrifice of sleep is worth seeing the results on the notice board announcing the topper. So that did work out well for me in the end as I did indeed graduate with honors.

Anyway personal anecdotes aside, the art of writing letters is fast disappearing. People never write love letters now to propose, they just do it online over a messenger (google talk) or send in an sms (mobile message). And Microsoft Office has so many leave letter templates that you just need to fill in and mail to the office. The skill of writing a succinct handwritten note has all but disappeared except for some holdouts like my friend Sowmya who I had mentioned above. I wish more power to them and may their tribe increase.

Part 2- Love Letters, Leave Letters and All That

Part 2- Love Letters, Leave Letters and All That

In the first part, before the interval I had left you dangling with me holding a love letter artfully inserted in my biology record book during lunch time. A record book which had been part of a pile on a table beside the door and which the biology teacher on entering the class asked us all to take and go home. I wasn’t supposed to have seen it then, for it clearly wasn’t meant to be found before I reached home where i would pull out my hair in suspense and frustration. But fate being kind to me, i had idly turned over the pages of the record before popping it in the bag and had discovered the evidence fresh on the scene of the crime. I discreetly started making enquiries all around and word of what had happened soon spread over the class. But the biology miss put an end to the ripples of disturbance by briskly rapping over a few heads with her wooden ruler.

It was later that evening when I was standing chatting to a group of friends over at the basketball court (we merely chat there, we don’t play) that one of my classmates, a short little girl called Girija, sauntered over to where we were standing in a group and standing off to one side to be clearly visible to me, started giving me meaningful looks and little nods of the head. Now, to tell the truth i had never fancied this girl for right from the beginning i had slotted her in the friend zone and it’s difficult to change suddenly and try to look at her with new eyes. So as i went up to her i was rapidly thinking over all the ways i could say "no" to her without making her a lifelong enemy and I started off by saying "look girlie, give me some time, this is all so sudden, never thought you felt this way about me". She impatiently waved my words off and said "hellooo, not me, you fool. The letter writer, do you want to know who?" despite her brusque manner of resolving my internal mental conflict, I was hurt by the abrupt way that she had turned down my refusal. The stupid conceited, head swollen girl, why couldn’t she be a proper little lady and allow me to refuse her? Why did she have to be the first to refuse me? Anyway what was wrong with me? Can’t she fall in love with me even if I didn’t love her?

Mistakenly taking my silence for some sort of internal turmoil at her words, she softened her words and spoke gently "we have been friends for a long time and that’s why I am helping you now by betraying my close friend. It’s Sujatha. She has been talking about doing this for a long time. She wants to distract you just before the exams, so you will not beat her and get first rank. She just wants to distract you. From studying". I knew that she was crazy but this crazy to score the first rank? It scarcely seemed probable at first thought but then on thinking again it made perfect sense. Girls knew the weaknesses of boys, give him an anonymous admirer and he would think of nothing else till he had found who it was. It made perfect sense plus it had been shown on TV recently- on a movie called “Lesa, Lesa” where actress Trisha drives actor Vivek mad with anonymous messages. So that’s what this was about- a straight copycat from a film scene. To tell the truth I was actually disappointed for a bit that i had no secret admirer.

I spent a long time thinking on what to do next. I could no more be distracted but it would be difficult for me to stay in the same group of friends as if nothing had happened when one of them had done this behind my back. In the end, I took my other friend Girija's (my informer's) advice and as she had told me to do, I went straight up to the biology madam in an otherwise empty staff room and handed over the letter. I saw the utter shock on her face, when she glanced down at it and realized that I had given her a love letter (she was unmarried then). But before she could say anything I told her in a accusatory tone "found this inside my biology record  yesterday miss" and I stood there watching her like a hawk.

My biology miss went red in the face and spluttered a bit and said "i never, well, i will see who wrote this, I will get to the bottom of it, you go now" she finished strangely looking very embarrassed and barely meeting my eyes. And so she must have done, for the next period she again asked for all our records to verify something again and i saw her during lunch time pouring over the records with the letter in hand. She never told me the results of her investigation but later on Girija shared the news to all the class (with a gleeful chuckle) that Sujatha had been called into the principal’s room. No one told me what the principal said to her but the class learnt later that she had been given an extended study leave from that day on and sent off home to prepare for the public exams. We never met again for she skipped the farewell meet but all that extra time to study must have been really useful for she scored great marks and got a seat in the prestigious Kilpauk medical college.

Meanwhile life goes on, I lost touch with my batch mates after school and didn’t know what they ended up doing in their lives. But just once on a hot summer day I happened to notice a name bored in one of the by lanes of Mylapore with the tag of Dr.Sujatha. And something prompted me to go in a check it out if it was indeed my old school mate. The doctor wasn’t in but a very talkative receptionist confirmed that it was indeed her and she was now a practicing dermatologist (skin specialist) with a husband and two kids to boot. I hurriedly left the place after giving a false name to the receptionist to fix the appointment for the evening. So that was the end of the anonymous letter story. I never did find out who wrote it to me. And oh, i forgot to add one tiny little detail. My biology miss, reduced my internal assessment marks by ten marks as punishment for receiving love letters. So if both Sujatha and I were punished, I still wonder who profited from that love letter.

So that’s the only brush i had ever had with a love letter. Unlike my contemporaries, i always preferred the more direct approach of shouting it out. Most of my proposals in the following years involved yelling out loudly across the quadrangle (so half the college could hear) "hey, you want to go out with me?” That kind of direct approach is my style or was until my college mate Anitha put me firmly in place once. To learn what she said to me and which changed my whole approach towards girls please come back tomorrow to read the next post.

(Please return tomorrow for Part 3 of this story)

Love Letters, Leave Letters And All That – Part 1.

Love Letters, Leave Letters And All That – Part 1.

 My friend Sowmya has a habit of leaving a handwritten note (with her feedback) in any novel she reads to surprise the next reader who borrows the same book to read. Personally I prefer that any books I read be not marred with any scribbling or graffiti of any kind but leaving a separate handwritten note on a paper does not constitute vandalism towards books so we can excuse her eccentricity and indulge her by crediting it to a quaint habit of connecting with readers of the same taste. But this made me think, when was the last time you found a hand written note in your book? For me it would have to be in my long gone school days. But before I come to that story, let me recall my long association with handwritten notes.

When i was young the letters we wrote (handwritten of course, for e-mail was not yet widely used) comprised of two special categories- leave letters and love letters. I must have written dozens of leave letters in my life, but only a few warrant special mentions, as I will share with you later on in this post. But let us first turn to the fascinating topic of writing love letters and leaving them secretly in others books. In my long and distinguished career as a man of words, i have been fortunate to assist in the writing of many love letters, some successful but mostly tragic. This never palled my attraction in continuing to write for i have never looked down in the face of a challenge but continued to produce purple prose involving roses, violets, clouds and assorted animals like deer and rabbits (whichever rhymed when needed) whenever a love letter needed to be produced at short notice, say like the fifteen minute mid-morning break in a school day.

Now let me confess dear reader that though i have written many, many love letters in my career, I have not had the opportunity to write a single love letter for myself. If you read  (carefully) between the lines of the previous line, you might chance upon the information that I did write a great many number of love letters, but tragically (for me)  all those love letters were for friends and fellow students who weren't literate enough to write their own version of their love story. A small and undeserved reputation for being good with rhyming words drew a lot of the romantic clientèle towards me to write their love letters for them. For the sake of world peace and universal love, i obliged my fellow classmates and friends by putting my romantic thoughts on paper and passing it on to the boys who passed it on to the love of their lives (for the day) as their original work

The hardest part of writing a love letter at short notice is the difficulty in finding enough romantic words which rhyme together. English is a hard language when it comes to writing on love; there is only the word "love" to describe a whole lot of emotions unlike other regional languages with their fair richer romantic vocabularies. A lot of time was spent on samosas and tea at the canteen trying to find words which match love, dove, stove, now ( you cow) etc. Fortunately (for me) though I was given full poetic license to use all these fanciful expressions of love, the end result (success or failure) was not mine to agonize over because the persons who commissioned me to write these love letters did not even bother to read them over once before handing them over to the girls they fancied. They were just in too much of a hurry (running against time) to hand over the letter to the girl before break time was over and we all had to troop back into class. Or alternatively to go hide the letters in the record books before the girl came to her desk after the break

Likewise the girls who got these lovey dovey letters never bothered to read them too, for they were too busy tearing them up and throwing them right in front of the guys face to show that they did not care for them. So all my masterpieces in love letter writing had no readers- a fact which filled me with sadness at first and then with glee when I realized all the opportunity this afforded me to have fun at others expense. Pretty soon I was throwing in a few words here and there about how the girl looked like a monkey’s offspring and how the guy loved her even then and passed it off with a straight face to the guy who gives them to the girl who in turn tears the letter to pieces without reading. I became so reckless that once or twice just on a whim i used to sign my own name in the love letter written for other guys and he in turn passing it on to his girl. Thankfully the girls, who got those letters with proof of my audacity, must have torn them up without reading, for no girl ever came to me and pulled my leg by saying "i accept".

Well those are about the love letters I wrote. Now to move on to a related topic - the ones which I received. Just like my friend Sowmya who leaves notes in others books, the girls of my acquaintance (in my younger days) were experts in leaving little love notes inside the boys books for them to read and tear their hair out wondering which one was the one who was in love with him. I remember finding one such little love note in my Biology record returning after lunch break. At first i thought it was my undigested lunch which was making me hallucinate. But the proof was solid in my hand. Someone had gone and done a "me" on me. Used my own trick on me. Who could it be who had so shyly (but in such passionate words) confessed their love for me just when we were about to break up for the study holidays before our final school leaving exams after which we will all drift off to different directions in life?

 (Please return tomorrow for Part 2 of this story)